Category Archives: Contemporary

Du Cristal

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Kaija Saariaho – Du Cristal, 1989 – for large orchestra.

Du Cristal was commissioned jointly by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Helsinki Festival, and it was first performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen in September 1990.

It is scored for a standard large symphony orchestra with the addition of an important part for synthesizer, and featuring a highly prominent percussion section. None of Saariaho’s major works to date is without some kind of electronic element, and the presence of the synthesizer is significant in the light of Saariaho’s remark that she tends to the orchestra itself ‘as if it was a huge synthesizer’. The standard form of electronic synthesis is ‘additive’ – that is, each sound is created by piling innumerable pure tones upon each other.

Transferred to the medium of the orchestra, this means that it is as if each individual instrument were analogous to a pure tone in a synthesizer, merely a tiny part of a large, slowly evolving mass of sound. Thus there is no polyphony, nor any melody in the conventional sense, although the music is frequently lyrical in its gestures and the activity within the textures may momentarily suggest polyphony; the important thing to follow is the overall drift of the orchestral mass, and to relate the individual details to that.

It’s an approach which owes something to the dense, multi-layered orchestral works of György Ligeti, such as “Atmosphères and Lontano”, as well as to the so-called ‘spectral-music’ of French composers Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, all of whom Saariaho has acknowledged as influences on her music; but her won style is nevertheless thoroughly personal and has distinctly brooding, ‘Northern’ character quite distinct from any of the afore-mentioned.

The harmonic character of Du Cristal is especially focused and clearly defined as the work is dominated by the bell-chord with which it opens. During the first seven minutes, this chord is slowly and methodically dissected: all its internal components are highlighted as its orchestration is progressively shaded and softened, although the basic character of the chord remains essentially unchanged.

There follows an eruption of some violence which breaks up the harmonic continuity of the music; a dialogue ensues between onslaughts of unpitched percussion and further bell sounds from tuned percussion and synthesizer.

After this the texture thins somewhat and the rate of harmonic change increases; melodic tissues briefly emerge on the violins and the woodwind. The increased rate of change precipitates the principal climax of the work, again featuring untuned percussion prominently: chaotic, irregular rhythms gradually merge into a hammeringly regular series of ostinatos for the full orchestra – the simplest and clearest music in the piece – and out of these the sound spectrum is gradually narrowed until a single note (a unison A flat) is heard

As this fades into filigree passages for solo strings, the music drifts closer to the harmonic world of the opening, and the original chord is itself twice restated; far from subsiding, however, the music suddenly veers back to the hammering ostinato of the climax – as if the form of the whole piece thus far had been telescoped into some two minutes. Only now can the music progress to the coda, underpinned by a series of wave-like crescendos on bass drum and synthesizer as the textures dwindle to a single cello trill.

This trill will be the starting point for second work of the cycle called …à la fumée. Saariaho took her title from a book by the French writer Henri Atlan, “Entre le cristal et la fumée”, and for her it signifies the way the same acoustic material is developed in sharply different ways in the two pieces, the turbulent energy and almost expressionist outbursts of Du Cristal subsiding into the capricious, playful double concerto of…à la fumée.

Petri Alanko, alto flute; Anssi Karttunen, cello, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, dir. Esa-Pekka Salonen

Solo for Viola d’Amore

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Solo for Viola d’Amore by Georg Friedrich Haas performed live by Garth Knox in Graz.

This is the second half of the piece. In the final section, the sympathetic strings are plucked and bowed directly, an unusual and striking effect. These are the second set of strings on the viola d’amore, usually not played directly, only there to resonate passively. In this piece they are amplified, and controlled by a volume pedal.

Morning scent of the acacia’s song

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Vache Sharafyan: Morning scent of the acacia’s song for duduk & string quartet (2001), commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project Inc. publisher G. SCHIRMER/ (excerpt)
performers: Gevorg Dabaghyan, Shirly Laub, Colin Jacobsen, Daniel Heim, Jeroen den Herder, Brussels philharmonic hall rehearsal – 2002

The duduk is a traditional woodwind instrument with double reed, popular in Caucasus. Extension goes from the F# on first space to the A over the staff in treble G clef.

Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco

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Jonathan Harvey: “Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco” (1980) for concrete sounds processed by computer.

Born in Warwickshire in 1939, Jonathan Harvey was a chorister at St Michael’s College, Tenbury and later a major music scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge. He gained doctorates from the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge and also studied privately (on the advice of Benjamin Britten) with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller. He was a Harkness Fellow at Princeton (1969-70).

An invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s has resulted in eight realisations at the Institute, or for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, including the tape piece Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco, Ritual Melodies for computer-manipulated sounds, and Advaya for cello and live and pre-recorded sounds. Harvey has also composed for most other genres: orchestra (including Madonna of Winter and Spring, Tranquil Abiding and White as Jasmine), chamber (including three String Quartets, Soleil Noir/Chitra, and Death of Light, Light of Death, for instance) as well as works for solo instruments.

analyzed by Pierre Boulez

December 1952

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December 1952 is the notorious Earle Brown’s score consisting only by horizontal and vertical lines varying in width (see it on the video). It’s a landmark piece on graphic notation. The player must translate the symbols in music.

David Tudor, overdubbed pianos.

Graphic Score Web-App Performance

Link to web-app

Goetia

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John Zorn: “Goetia” (2002) for solo violin. Jennifer Koh, violin.

Goetia is in fact a demon’s invocation closely tied to numerology. The piece consists of eight variations for solo violin. The work’s guiding feature is that each of the eight movements utilizes the same sequence of 277 pitches transformed by tempo variations, octave displacements, and modifications in rhythm and intensity.

The times of movements are

  1. “Goetia I” – 0:57
  2. “Goetia II” – 2:46
  3. “Goetia III” – 1:07
  4. “Goetia IV” – 1:42
  5. “Goetia V” – 1:12
  6. “Goetia VI” – 1:54
  7. “Goetia VII” – 2:53
  8. “Goetia VIII” – 1:20

YUAN

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梁雷 (Lei Liang): YUAN (2008) for saxophone quartet

Lei Liang (b.1972) is a Chinese-born American composer whose orchestral, chamber and stage works have been performed throughout the world.

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Aaron Copland Award, Lei Liang’s commissions and performances have come from the New York Philharmonic, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, the Fromm Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, the Arditti, Ying and Shanghai Quartets, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, percussionist Steven Schick, among others.

Lei Liang’s music is recorded on Telarc, Mode, Innova, GM and New World (forthcoming) Records. As a scholar, he is active in the research and preservation of traditional Asian music. Lei Liang studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (BM and MM) and Harvard University (PhD).

He was named Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University; taught in China as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shaanxi Normal University College of Arts in Xi’an; served as Honorary Professor of Composition and Sound Design at Wuhan Conservatory of Music and as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College. Since 2007, he has taught as Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.

Her site is here.

Yuan – Prism Quartet

A Colone

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Iannis Xenakis – A Colone (1977) for Choir and Chamber Ensemble

Marco Stroppa: the video

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After the Marco’s master, I publish here the link to the IRCAM video about his works for solo instrument and chamber electronics.

Here you can find excerpts from …of silence, hist whist and I will not kiss you f.ing flag. You can also see Arshia Cont, the creator of the astonishing score and tempo following software Antescofo.

I already posted this link on Dec. 12 2009, but now I point out again because here the students can see some applications of the systems that Marco described in his lecture.

In any case, the video is very interesting.

Eclipse

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Tōru Takemitsu (武満 徹, Takemitsu Tōru, October 8, 1930 – February 20, 1996) was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Though largely self-taught, Takemitsu is recognised for his skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre, drawing from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen.

In 1951 Takemitsu was a founding member of the anti-academic Jikken Kōbō (実験工房, “experimental workshop”): an artistic group established for multidisciplinary collaboration on mixed-media projects, who sought to avoid Japanese artistic tradition. The performances and works undertaken by the group introduced several contemporary Western composers to Japanese audiences. During this period he wrote Saegirarenai Kyūsoku I (“Uninterrupted Rest I”, 1952: a piano work, without a regular rhythmic pulse or barlines); and by 1955 Takemitsu had begun to use electronic tape-recording techniques in such works as Relief Statique (1955) and Vocalism A·I (1956).

During his time with Jikken Kōbō, Takemitsu came into contact with the experimental work of John Cage. Although the immediate influence of Cage’s procedures did not last in Takemitsu’s music, certain similarities between Cage’s philosophies and Takemitsu’s thought remained. For example, Cage’s emphasis on timbres within individual sound-events, and his notion of silence “as plenum rather than vacuum”, can be aligned with Takemitsu’s interest in ma (a japanese concept usually translated as the space between two objects). Furthermore, Cage’s interest in Zen practice (through his contact with Zen Master Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki) seems to have resulted in a renewed interest in the East in general, and ultimately alerted Takemitsu to the potential for incorporating elements drawn from Japanese traditional music into his composition:

I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage. The reason for this is that in my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being “Japanese”, to avoid “Japanese” qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.

In particular, Takemitsu perceived that, for example, the sound of a single stroke of the biwa or single pitch breathed through the shakuhachi, could

so transport our reason because they are of extreme complexity […] already complete in themselves.

This fascination with the sounds produced in traditional Japanese music brought Takemitsu to his idea of ma which ultimately informed his understanding of the intense quality of traditional Japanese music as a whole:

Just one sound can be complete in itself, for its complexity lies in the formulation of ma, an unquantifiable metaphysical space (duration) of dynamically tensed absence of sound. For example, in the performance of nō, the ma of sound and silence does not have an organic relation for the purpose of artistic expression. Rather, these two elements contrast sharply with one another in an immaterial balance.

So we can see this strange situation: an eastern composer that first avoid the eastern music, reconcile with it thanks to a western composer.